“High-Resolution Photography comes to the iPhone” was enticing — well, sort of. Cloudburst’s new software helps you overcome the low-resolution limitations of the iPhone in a tricky way
Vancouver based Cloudburst Research has a new twist on taking photos on your iPhone. Their AutoStitch creates high-resolution images of up to 20 megapixels using the iPhone’s own camera, and allows iPhone users to create poster-quality images that can exceed those from even expensive dedicated cameras. This extraordinary resolution is achieved by a fully automated approach for seamlessly stitching together multiple images taken from a single location.
With this major update, AutoStitch allows iPhone users to create poster-quality images. Despite its limited resolution, the iPhone is now the most frequently used camera on popular photography sites such as Flickr.
AutoStitch has previously gathered impressive reviews and an enthusiastic user community for its ability to stitch wide-angle panoramas from freehand images snapped in any order or arrangement from a single location. Due to processing and memory restrictions of the iPhone platform, previous versions of AutoStitch limited the final resolution of the panorama to a similar size as a single iPhone image, which is 3 megapixels on the iPhone 3Gs and 2 megapixels on earlier models. Cloudburst Research has recently developed faster stitching algorithms and new methods for robust memory management on the iPhone, which now allow for dramatically higher stitched resolutions while still maintaining fast performance.
The new version of AutoStitch allows a user to choose their desired resolution for stitching and the final maximum image size. On the iPhone 3GS, the user can select a maximum final image size of up to 20 megapixels, which will be achieved when stitching 10 or more overlapping images. Due to internal memory restrictions, the maximum resolution on the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G is lower, at 5 megapixels, but this still more than doubles the camera resolution of 2 megapixels.
While some other iPhone apps attempt to expand a single iPhone image to a higher resolution, they can add no new detail that was not in the original image and therefore have limited utility to a photographer. AutoStitch creates genuine high resolution images that extend the capabilities of the iPhone camera into new territory.
Requires any iPhone with OS 2.2.1 or later: AutoStitch 2.0 is only $1.99 (USD) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Photography category. The full App Store name is AutoStitch Panorama.
iPhone AutoStitch Panorama 2.0
Cloudburst Research is located in Vancouver, BC, Canada. It is a spin-off company from the University of British Columbia. It was founded in March 2009 to transfer the latest university research in the field of the computer vision to consumer applications on mobile devices. Copyright (C) 2009 Cloudburst Research. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone and iPod are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.
